54 ❧ chapter two
kind of sound the player hears. Sometimes it also affects what is transmitted to
the audience. Exceedingly useful to the harpsichord is some kind of resonat-
ing and refl ecting body, whether it be walls, ceiling, or fl oor. Plush curtains
and thick carpets are the harpsichord’s sworn enemies. In order to eliminate
them, I have sometimes been obliged to insist on throwing open the entire
naked stage or on playing in front of the lowered fi re screen. Harpsichord
sound only carries best in a line perpendicular to the curve of the instrument
but also upwards. For this reason the harpsichord sounds better when heard
from the gallery than when heard from the fl oor.
My blacklist of bad concert halls would fi ll volumes. It would include most
of those in New York City. The worst halls are generally the most recent, victims
of those acousticians who believe that music is made of sound waves, frequen-
cies, resonators, and echoes, and who totally overlook the fact that music was
never made to be judged by scientifi c instruments, and that it cannot even be
judged by the human ear alone, since it is directed toward those immeasurably
complex and unpredictable psychological and physical reactions of the entire
human organism and toward its capacities of imagination and remembered
experience.
In our time, the human ear itself is becoming increasingly distracted and cor-
rupted by what it hears coming out of loudspeakers at home and at work, in
banks and in stores, in elevators, and in airports. Even those acousticians who
retain vestiges of hearing have been led by prevailing fashion toward an ideal
of concert hall sound that is governed by the sound of hi-fi equipment in much
the same way that the installations of museums and the hanging and restoring of
pictures have become infl uenced by the bad color reproductions that abound in
those art books that now weigh down coffee tables all over the world.
Most of these bad new halls have abandoned everything that in several
thousand years of architecture was learned about the natural circulation of air.
Even when air-conditioning systems are suffi ciently quiet to enable the per-
former himself to hear what he’s playing, their constant hum kills not only
sound but also that indispensable part of music which is silence. Just as a drafts-
man needs the contrast between live and empty space unless, of course, he is
consciously wishing to bridge the gap, so the harpsichord, or for that matter
any instrument, needs the contrast between sound and silence in order for
the expressive gamut of articulation and duration of notes to function. I have
made myself exceedingly unpopular with certain concert sponsors, and I fear
with some audiences, by insisting the air conditioning be turned off. I am sorry
to see the public swelter, but I’m unwilling to submit to the sabotage of what, as
an artist, I may have to offer.
Among the older bad halls are those with absorbent backgrounds, fancy
shapes, and high stages. Multi-purpose halls such as theaters and movie houses
are often among the worst, but by no means invariably. I know good halls with
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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